With apologies to Jerry Garcia

Woke up at 3 am today with the Grateful Dead in my head. "What a long, strange Lent it's been!" Yeah, I know the Dead would never be singing about Lent in real life, but in my head they can do whatever I want.

This really has been my strangest Lent ever. For one thing, it started so damn early! I need more than a month to recover from Christmas before getting ready to kick off Lent. I had absolutely no time to get in a warm weather trip between - or any kind of trip for that matter. There was no vacation, no recovery, no psychological refreshment - just all that damn snow and tons of it to make my mood worse.

Also for the first time ever I ended up missing 2 of the 6 Wednesday services. Of course Ash Wednesday was cancelled because of the snow storm, an oddity in itself. This week I missed a second one as I was home under layers of blankets trying to sweat out a 2 day fever. Thursday night the fever finally broke, only to lead to a weekend with full congestion kicking in (2nd round of this nasty cold this winter.)

Add to that the loss of Moses and our adjustment here at home to being just me & Max. (He, by the way, loved it when I was home sick. Sweet little thing curled up constantly against the furnace that I was to absorb all my extra body heat.) And then there was last weekend's Daylight Saving Time and my oversleeping nightmare. Plus the concerns over Mom & Dad's health, and a day surgery of my own to remove a cyst. There has not been a week of Lent without something odd or crappy happening.

So all that led to my extra early wake-up this morning with Jerry Garcia singing about strange Lents in my head. Try as I might, I could not get back to sleep either, which did not bode well for a Palm Sunday & Confirmation service. Thankfully the services went fairly well - first one had some bugs as it often does, but the late one was good. Now it's on to the rest of Holy Week.

Man, do I need Easter! I am ready for this long, strange trip to end.